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Part 82
Sitemap --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- - More interesting items/ideas for a Bioshock Rapture MMORPG --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- - Part 82 --- --- --- --- --- All those 'Plastered' (slang for being extremely drunk) Splicers in Sinclair Spirits : With all the booze still laying around in Rapture, it begs several questions : - Why didn't we see various drunk Splicers staggering around ? - Were the bottles left undrunk because they had been refilled with less than savory/more-recently-made alcohol ? (or contained 'other' contents ?) - Was a possible Side-effect of Plasmid abuse that Alcohol is toxic, and only a little makes you sick (hence any individual that didn't learn that lesson may have added to more than a few of the corpse we see liberally strewn about). Note - Jack/Delta/Sigma weren't 'long time' users -- yet. --- --- --- Weird Looking Metro Trolleys in BS1 : They looked just wrong to me from the start. Too small, too narrow, no seats, those weird porthole doors (if thats what they were, as they open onto the platforms) that must've had people tripping on them daily. An Idea occurred to me : The Trolley Cars we see may have been old freight units pressed into service after various damage done to the system by Atlas and the fighting. No seats inside - space is for freight, and the big opening out the back (for loading longer freight items and being used often as the main loading door (those porthole shaped things would make it rather clumsy). See the pix pix of what the real cars should have looked more like. --- --- --- Fontaine Aint No Al Capone : 1) Rapture isn't big enough for either the Smuggling or Fontaine's Plasmid business to add up to the money they (writers) portrayed that Fontaine had (particularly in the DLC). Remember profit is usually a fraction of the gross sales -- the Net Profit is after ALL the expenses are paid. 2) The Smuggling operation could only be so large due to the difficulty moving any large amount or value of Contraband (and you have to trade for something valuable to the outside world, and THAT would eventually run out). There is alot of overhead for the illegal operation, and that absorbs profit. 3) The ADAM business wasn't illegal (and there would have been competition all along, like Ryan who Fontaine could not coerce). So higher/premium prices would NOT be paid by the users, like they had been for illegal alcohol during Prohibition (or drugs in our day). In the REAL real-world, Capone had a population/customer base a thousand times bigger than any Rapture market. 4) Fontaine strong-arming too many people (in his various criminal ventures) would eventually come to light via Raptures Free Press (and Ryan's (if any) could not/would not be forced to keep quiet about Fontaine). Criminal acts of threatening/torturing/blackmailing/killing by Fontaine to get a monopoly is STILL against basic laws, and even if the authorities didn't act , indiviuals could -- Fontaine eventually would have someone walk up to him and remove his head with a shotgun or axe. --- --- --- Bits-n-Pieces Hunt - for 'Quest/Missions : Player has to find X, Y & Z, and assemble them to make a Whatzit to get them out of a trap, or to get/unlock the prize, (or as a fabrication tutorial for something useful). In an enclosed game scenario 'instance', this could be done with a pile of junk the player has to MacGyver into whatever solution, using the MMORPG game's extensive assembly/formula/fabrication game mechanics. Such Problems might be used for contests (later Players vote on the most imaginitive solution...). Turning tutorial skill training into a game also make for less 'grind' tedium. This mechanism would definitely be quite a bit more than that lame 'cog and gear' Flashgame in the Industrial Revolution promotional game. --- --- --- Tenenbaum's "Reversing ADAM Sickness" : Tenenbaum's method (by BS1 time) - how certain even with the "Rescue" Plasmid that The 'saved' Little Sisters are ever going to be anything close to normal?? How exactly did Tenenbaum 'test' her new Rescue_Little_Sister Plasmid ? Wouldn't that require trying it on one Little Sister after another, and with what result for the failures?? Trials done over and over before she got it to work ? She mentions trying it on Splicers... what did it do to them?? And how did she get ahold of them to test them in the first place ?? (Neat flashback scene for the MMORPG... Strapped down sSplicer and Tenebaum saying "Now this probably WILL hurt alot....") Tenenbaum throws it to Jack, but was it actually tested before that point ? How ? It is a Plasmid that has to be applied to the person who then will do 'the saving' (Hmm Tenenbaum used it herself, maker her a Splicer???) . And while Tenenbaum was developing it, how many Little Sisters died screaming as their insides were shredded by genetic displacement ? (Remember though, that Tenenbaum was pretty bloodless about her clinical methods.) In the 'Good' ending of Bioshock 1, you see an aged Jack, but what if that was mere months after they escaped, and the ex-Little Sisters also have aged rapidly because of their modified Slug-symbiant exposure (like Jack) to Tenenbaum's treatment? Not so 'good' an ending with that happening, no? --- --- --- Ryan Announcement '- "'Attention Rapture, ADAM Production has been Shut Down to Free All the Children Enslaved by Fontaine. Be aware that all criminal violence will continue to be met with deadly force by Rapture Security. That is all." It was Ryan who brought the Little Sisters out into the open (publicly showing their existance) - the ones (how many??) that Fontaine had kept well hidden. But what to do with them? Apparently there was no way (then) to undo the implantation, so... (remember Tenenbaum didn't have her "Rescue" Plasmid til about the time Jack arrived.) - I still don't think recycling ADAM from bodies would help much in increasing the available ADAM supply, particularly with the continuing loss of 'Gatherers' (who are also the primary ADAM 'generators') while doing that dangerous activity. A constant entrophy of ADAM in the system. What was the efficiency in recovering it from a Corpse -- how much was recoverable from each? (Particularly if it degrades with time in the users body...) It might have made sense immediately when the Civil War was generating many corpses, but eventually that supply would decrease greatly. Fresh corpses becoming very rare when the remaining surviving Splicers became more clever, more cautious, or just didnt have much ADAM anymore to use. Fewer and fewer bodies (and not everyone was an ADAM-addict), further and further apart, more and more desperate Splicers wanting to 'Harvest' the LS -- til it wasn't worth the effort or risk to 'Gather' anymore. After the Pheromone Control was instituted, would there be many (any) more bodies ? - Gots to have the game offer that "Moral Choice" to the Player....(developer hype...) BS. What moral choice? When you get as much for NOT killing them as for 'Harvesting' them? The game designers wussed out (so much for being exceptional, or 'something new'... or 'moral' or 'choice'). --- --- --- Big Daddies Now Help Little Sisters - Just To Get Their ADAM 'Fix' ... DLC writers just threw together all these things, oblivious to the existing Canon (or simply NOT CARING). SO a few still instable Alphas simply couldn't wait thru the sickening 'cuteness' and simply tore off some heads and imbibed the sweet ADAM they were craving. Happened alot (maybe). This is what results when a game company is winding down and have previously existing obligations (those 'Season Pass thingees) forcing them to produce something, but them not really caring too muchand just wanting to get it done with. Result - massive Canon Breakage and sloppy/hacked together storylines. --- --- --- Columbia (Infinite BS) IS Simply Fantasy (compared to Rapture) : ' You look at how physically impossible the whole place is (at least Rapture had a chance to mechanically work, even with the Genetic Plasmid stuff, which you have to go a long way to try to explain logically). Columbia is [pretty much in the land of ''Harry Potter and can stay afloat because of Purple Unicorn pharts or somesuch. The delving into faux quantum physics and ghosts and timetravel and parallel universes (as an excuse?) is almost as much Fantasy as the political BS about the place allegedly representing America 1912. When it comes down to it, it is all window dressing, thrown together ontop of a Shoot-em up Blast-fest game with endless slaughtering of socially-acceptable human targets. --- --- --- '''Ryan's Vita Chamber : We have no real details of how far Vita-Chambers worked, for some other one to work or how long it really can take or if Ryan had a second one hidden (so if they wanted to bring him back for Bioshock 3 they could explain it with little problem.) Faking out Atlas/Fontaine would have been a excellent plot mechanism, but they messed that up. He knew his son was thoroughly control programmed and having Ryan commit suicide seems a very stupid way to supposely attempt to snap Jack out of it. A "man" doesn't give up, but Ryan did and turned surrender monkey. Give me a break -- it doesnt make any sense when Atlas was almost completely defeated. Ryan just need grab Jack and then deprogram him and finish off Atlas with a splicer Zerg Rush using the Pheromone Control or via a huge bounty. Ryan could then rebuild his city and then find a cure. It would have taken a little imagination to have a much more epic plot than what we got in BS1. But Ryan need not die and Rapture need not fail. "What doesnt kill you makes you stronger". Plenty of avenues to lead to rebuilding and reaching the goal that Ryan sought. Giving-in might be a Ken Levine solution, but it would not be for a real Andrew Ryan. (TVTrope about when authors dont actually understand the characters they have created...) --- --- --- More on Alleged Moral Choice : A moral choice has a cost. If there is no real cost, then the 'choice' is easy (a non-choice - a 'no brainer' - no test of moral character). What exactly can they do to YOU as the Player to 'cost' ? - since this is merely a computer game ? Shame usually requires an audience to be ashamed before. Rationalizing misdeeds is simple. You can simply turn it off or 'replay' when you 'get killed'. Most people are already hardened to any of the poorly presented (and oversaturated) violence ('poor' as in hardly gut-wrenching to see a bunch of pixels die/be mutilate). Empathy with your targets isn't desired (certainly with the mass-murderer type bodycounts you produce - its the main component of these games), and for the typical conditioned player, loyalty to allies is worth no more than the stuff you get from them or needing them to get to the next level. Columbia - They've presented extremes (Founders/Vox) to justify the blast-fest part of the game, so little feeling is involved for taking sides - no more than shooting the red vs green ducks in a shooting gallery. The 'thought experiment' BS now allows the 'its all a dream, so who cares' skew to distance the Player further from what is shown to be going on. These games don't even have much cost for failing or when you do 'succeed', the cutscenes at the end do whatever they want regardless. Exposing most of the game thru the trailers and endless interviews didn't help (suspense and not knowing what might effect any possible outcomes in-game is now largely gone). Ditto (in spades) if the emphasis is supposed to be 'story'..... Lets not forget the level of HYPE that leads to over-expectation and the inevitable 'let down' when you discover "Oh, thats all that its really about" and "I saw that last week 3 times on TV". Its fortunate then that Infinite's confusing plot and logic fell upon players who largely didn't care anyway. --- --- --- Ryan had a Little Lamb and Comstock was White as Snow ... : Lamb was simply a liar and used religion for her own ends. Her other delusion of being able to remove humanity from the human race is far worse. Comstock may be exactly the same or actually believe the stuff he has made up (a largely missed psycho-drama...) Levine layed the Pseudo-Christian Cult stuff on pretty thick, and again I wonder how anyone could somehow seriously compare that to any reality of America in that era (in religion or in ANY other way). But then, the whole thing is fantasy -- smokin pixie dust........ (sub-par and a sad waste.... but KA-CHING!!! $$$) --- --- --- The Infinite BS AI Hype : It would be nice if most scenes in the game did not constantly degenerate into a shooting spree/bloodbath with combat which cannot be avoided (you often lose (die) when that happens in any semblance of reality). This type of game does not have real Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is Trigger Scripting Choreography, which they have had in games for over 20 years. It might be to a somewhat higher detail level than that long ago, but it is hardly revolutionary. IF similar effort seen on that Beach playground scene was carried over to the rest of the game to give you many more options on how to handle a scenes situation, THEN it might have been a real advancement. Keep the shooting for the Players who like to shoot (with more options for them too), but allow the Player to think a little more, and a chance to do different things when playing it a second/further times. It does not even have to be all sneaking (avoiding combat), as there could be all kinds of possibilities for actions to get through, so to advance across the floating city to the staged plot scenes. The interviewed speakers on the 'AI' subject talked like they spent ALOT of effort on that one Beach scene. So that means the rest of the game they could not. Most of the game reverted to the usual simple choreographed shoot ups, when they couldn't maintain that detail effort level for the rest. Was it really that special anyway? It was just a bunch of little simple scenes which reacted to the Players proximity (with canned acting and little interaction) and if you went back a second time it just repeated or the NPCs just stood their dumbly. SO more time consuming little scripts to make (most effort was the special animations), but no real 'smarts' involved. Elizabeth had a somewhat larger repertoire of actions through the games, which got repetitious soon enough. --- --- --- Infinite BS not really 'Bioshock' : It was saddle heavily with the crutch of fantasy elements, an easy excuse to have wizzbang effects to attempt to compete with current games. Guys with machine guns - check. Guys with flame throwers - check. Chainsaw (or equiv) - check. Flying whatzits to jump onto - check. Mass slaughter - check. Player led by the nose like a dumb animal thru a contrived story - check. To be more clear - they could have done it without all the science-fakery fantasy stuff. I guess everyone in the place (Columbia's inhabitants - not the developers) is on mushrooms for them to see Columbia that way (really it is a dull drab windblown bordertown in Texas - NOW THAT would be a better story! ... Ole Pete the moonshiner slipped some Jimson weed into his mash...). But then even the machine-guns/flame-throwers aren't glitzy enough to compete with the effects other games show, so they take the easy development route into lala-land to pull out all this other weird sorta ghosty stuff. The March-Hare is late for the Tea Party. Throw in some quantum physics BS, stir it with metaphysical stupidity, drizzel on the absurdly presented carricature 'social issues' to make it 'special', shake well and you have a fine mess unworthy of the name "Bioshock". Rapture and Plasmids were integral to BS1, in Infinite BS they seem to be merely there to sell the game - recycled game mechanics. Weird ability buffs via "Gears" (magic pants!!!) to be equivalent to the Tonic effects. 'Magnetic' Shields that unfortunately cannot block 'stupid'. Skyline, a shadow of what would have been 'good'. Worse, it then backflowed into Rapture in that DLC. --- --- That Fantasyland Bioshock 3 - It could have been Lovecraft meets Tesla, but NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!... --- --- --- MMORPG's Game Architecture Stuff (harder implementation) : Requiring the Server scaling (processing power) to be much greater than in these previous simpler games. (Good) NPC AI for example (in this MMORPG), possibly with farmed-out AI processing -- and those seperate NPC AI Server computers having to maintain their own local World representations - with all the World map updates flowing (across a high speed server network). With a greatly increased amount of data traffic through individual World Map zone Servers (the world-state bookkeeping process), that starts burdening individual servers with larger loads, requiring yet more of them, each for smaller areas (and added overhead of the zone/area edge handling - used for large continuous worlds). Communication bound limitations become a secondary effect of increased data processing (CPU bound). More complex AI can use magnitudes more CPU processing and significantly more local data per 'smart' object (NPCs...) Individual Server performance has not increased by magnitudes. The new game complexity would require another O(N^2) expansion as there is far more interactions across CPUs, each handling fewer and fewer 'smarter' objects (the interaction data traffic having to go across the always slower network interface(even with 10Gb), instead of within one servers shared memory space). So in other words - big huge powerful servers required. --- --- --- Your Own WTF Board in Your In-game Residence/Team Base : A Working Stringboard (strings linking inspectable items on a Bulletin Board) like Ryan's (or Sullivan's, or similar to that interface in SitS) : A visualization tool to allw easily reviewing pieces of information and to sort/keep track of projects or things you are interested in. Mapping out your plans... Employ for Mission Clues (including filling that bridge string or missing item to be inserted). Used for a games Puzzle Solving mechanism ?? (Heres a story, heres some clues, solve it...) Possible flowchart for projects - "Get the Thing-a-mahjig first, then repair the Whatzit using the Doohickey, you need to first obtain somewhere... " You probably also want 'Tags' you can tie to objects you keep, with 'Notes' to remind yourself why you are saving various pieces of junk (actually those should be attachable to any item you have stored). A general place to visually store stuff you haven't figured out what to do with yet. The command interface integrates this interface (You tell one of your 'Team' NPCs : "Go get information about that" (pointing), OR "Go get this missing part or parts on THIS Plan", or "STOP that project and work on THIS one" ...) Different info types : pictures/photos, documents, momentoes, postit-notes/flags, newspaper clippings, strange little items in baggies, doodles, maps(with their own pins), money bills, business cards, blueprints/schematics, etc.... A variety of 'string' colors and drawing pen markers to act as status/priority/checkmark indicators. (Similar interfaces for workbenches/desks - and multiples of them if desired to seperate different things) 'Strings' that link to WHERE you have something stashed (looking through inventory/banks/whatever can be tedious --- --- --- Game Fire Effects Improvements : Obscuring Smoke and Steam and roaring Infernos and asphyxiation, sprinkler systems, smoke being seen coming under doors/out of vents, your Team NPCs saying "Do you smell something burning ??", etc ... lotsa fun. Closed areas fill quickly with smoke (how do you have fire-escapes when you can't get to the outside of the building ???) Fires don't just go out quickly and can spread rapidly if the conditions are right. Beware the Splice with the gallon bucket of Kelp brewed 180-proof Alcohol... "Warning, Fire spreads." (in Incinerate! User Film...) Hearing your own scream when you are on fire might be a bit disconcerting (not quite as easy to shrug off as the old generalized damage system in the original games - 3rd degree burns needs skin grafts...). Dousing oil flames with water doesn't work very well , neither does it work well on electrical equipment (different kinds of fires...) Equipment can be damaged by burning. Breathing gear would be a key piece of equipment for Rapture's Firefighters which may have been most often manned by 'volunteer' fire brigades (like in the old days). Most building structures had sprinkler systems and firewalls as a standard safety measure, but not everyone maintained the systems on their properties. Arson... Who ever said that there are "no laws" in Rapture ? Ryan only said HE would only make the One Law (the one about Smuggling having the Death Penalty). Rapture would have its own laws for many things. Many societies had (often the most) severe penalties for Arson due to its easily getting out of control and the indiscriminant way it could kill and destroy. Fortunately most of Rapture was built out of concrete, which doesn't burn easily. Internal furnishings/subwalls burning would often use up the available oxygen before getting hot enough to burn the cement. This limiting fires largely to the contents and inhabitants of an area contained by the door seals. Along with many of the other 'New Rapture' rollplaying missions, a gig being part of a 'volunteer' fire department and assisting in various fire scenarios would be included in the MMORPG. Seeing some NPC's possessions go up in smoke might make you aware so that you dont skimp on your own fire prevention/supression systems for YOUR property. --- --- Revised U-Invent Machines : No more of that converting Distilled Water and Brass Tubing into Heat-seeking Grenades. Doing genetic chemical processing (ie- Lazarus Vector) also was a bit outside their scope. I would have had you use a Gatherers Garden (better -- one Langford had modified) for the Lazarus Vector in the game, myself. Building up even fairly simple things takes a bit more than most of the things we fed into those U-Invent machines (dont worry in MMORPGs you have lots of time to do this stuff, and to remember not to throw away all the little bits and pieces you find). There are still lots of simple things that can be made which are useful for minor repairs. They are a little less than a 'Rent-A-Machine-Shop', but were good for those Citizens who couldn't afford the bunch of machines to do such work piecemeal. When using it, you also would be continually feeding money into a coin slot as you used it (the game devs didnt want that complication - so that feature was missing). 'Power To The People' machines were actually modified U-Invent equipment, customized for the standard weapon upgrades they were preprogrammed for (and for the MMORPG you would spend a bit longer at work using it than imagined by the ADAM-addled Jack and Delta). If you do some of the Fabrication (crafting) training in the MMORPG you will probably be using a reconditioned U-Invent machine for some of the simpler tasks. (So their would be a City Bounty for ones retrieved from 'The Ruins'). --- --- --- MMORPG - Collision - To Collide or Not To Collide, That Is The Question : Online games have problems with latency delays between the Clients and Servers (over the Internet), which cause abberations in the timings of Player's interactions. So you will see many games that do NOT do collison detection between the Players (You can run right thru other Players), and game mechanics which dont require split sectond reactions. The game doesn't have to handle the complication when Players positions are on different relative delay timelines. That can be disconcerting and unrealistic (particularly in a better detailed game like the MMORPS wants to be). It can be solved by having the Client do predictive calculations to prevent passing through another Player/NPC, along with a bit of visual 'patching' when something suddenly changes course while moving rapidly, and the change causes an 'unpredicted' conflict. Its more processing and harder to program successfully. You still cannot do the twitch actions of fighting games, but higher detail and more realistic movements is where MMORPGs need to go to improve. --- --- --- Another Game Asset - Situational Sound Tracks : Interesting use of background battle 'theme' using rythmic patterns instead of music (which can be discerned as being repetitive sooner by Player). Useful technique for 'Quest' scenarios where the Player takes an indeterminant amount of time to achieve 'success', and other times a music Sound Track can be distracting from sound clues. Rythmic patterns can be more easily varied/mixed and have fade in/out and choreographed transitions/changes. So yet another element for the palette Player Creators can make use of. --- --- --- Questions, Questions ... : If Fontaine has Jack created ~4 years before (~1956) the events of Bioshock, then the Bathyspheres had to have been 'locked down' before that (or just the ones leading to the Lighthouse). Fontaine wanted Jack to have Ryan's genetic match (otherwise why need it/mention it), so possibly other security measures using "Genetic" Keying also existed. Is it likely for the 'Bathyspheres' to be locked down in 1952 (when Rapture was officially isolated from the Surface), when related events (ending of major city construction) precipitated an economic downturn. Just at that time Anton Kincaide was organized his Rapture Metro system (when before that, Bathyspheres WERENT as significant) - Doesnt make sense for a 'Lockdown' of the whole Bathysphere system JUST as it was opening up. So this "lockdown" must've happened alot later. As usual, vague mentions of events with little additional detail (like time to make clear the order they happened in) poorly explains why certain people had motive and did certain things. - BS2 - If Ryan was on the inside of Rapture Central Control, why would you assume shutting down that electric lock (powered externally - yeah that sounds real genius) would get you in ? (the device called a "Deadbolt" HAD already long been invented... and THAT could be made UnHackable). I suppose Ryan already knew who Jack was, and was letting him in to spring his own 'fake dying' gambit on Fontaine (Twist within the Twist...). - BaS shows Little Sisters in the Main street and Booker comments about Elizabeth being ignorant of them being "ADAM factories". Wasn't it implied previously in the games that Fontaine had to keep the use of the children in his 'orphanages' secret, or face (possibly fatal) backlash from the Citizens of Rapture (and certainly the parents of the children who weren't likely told what their children were going to be used for) ?? (More f'k'd up RetCon Canon from Mr 'Its Prime') --- --- --- Pheromone-Schmeromone : Supposedly Andrew Ryan, desperate to win Rapture's civil war, resorted to Pheromones to control his population, with the justification of 'if Atlas won they'd be no better off than slaves' anyway. One difference is that Ryan would eliminate that control once the reason for using it was eliminated. Atlas started by murdering people, so why should he stop to get what he wants ? The extent to which the Pheromone mechanism 'controlled' people also is not mentioned - and for Ryan just to get them to stop fighting for Atlas would be enough. --- --- --- TV In Rapture : People started arriving (1946) before TV really got going (only about 50K TVs each in the UK/US at that time), though many other immigrants arriving upto 1952, who they would likely have been exposed to some of "TV's golden age". 20000-40000 potential viewers (originally) and probably using it much the same way as on the Surface World - advertisements, entertainment and news shows, soap operas. Technology being more prevalent, the number of stations/channels could be many more, with diverse programming. So you might see the much later decline of quality made possible by every one who THOUGHT the could make TV shows - yes Cable TV came to Rapture decades before it afflicted the Surface World. We see TVs all over Rapture by 1960 (BS1 - likely all there by end 1958). Some seen in BS2 years later may have been moved, as it is unlikely Lamb's addled followers even knew how to repair them, let alone make new ones. (Talk about afflicting peiople - imagine what Sofia Lamb's TV shows were like...). Color TVs not seen yet, except in Porters Bat Cave (Or had Wahl taken it over for himself by then??). New Rapture is not likely to be developing that technology with all the other priorities (caused by the Civil War). So Black and White TV just like the old days... --- --- --- Fan Fiction Control : How to keep the MMORPG Canon from 'running off the the AE Track' into The Great Abyss of maudlin derivativeness ? "Ryan was NOT in fact a follower of an ancient mystic cult worshiping Banjo playing puppets" The only Ponies in Rapture died and were eaten during the Civil War. 16 new types of Splicers and 10 of Big Daddies arent needed or wanted. Its unlikely any of the Players ex-Splicer characters will be realated to known characters. As the Neo-Canon expands, the possibilities of conflict of any new with the old grows exponentially, so it has to be watched carefully. The Online Creation Community would need a central authority that coordinateds and judges what is too far outside of the overall storyline (rules would be well documented to keep some people from wasting their time). This would not only keep the details coordinated (preventing conflicts), but maintain a cohesive vision. --- --- --- Prest-O-Change-O : ''' The name of a Plasmid 'Slot' ADAM product that facilitated quick changing of incompatible Plasmids. We (Jack/Delta) seemed to have gotten some of this product in the Bioshock Games without knowing it. This product apparently was available after the Civil War started (still, many Splicers didn't have multiple Plasmids - probably it got harder to come by). Ryan didn't want more crazies, so he would have pushed for stabilization additives for the ADAM products his forces used (which might explain why so many Splicers were still alive many years later). Originally you could apply Plasmids to different hands, or other 'local' sections of the body, so as to not have them 'conflict'. --- --- --- '''Contraband Flows Both Ways... : If people could be smuggled into Rapture, then they could be smuggled out - for the right price. Probably not people addicted to ADAM, who couldn't leave their only source (or could you lick a Rapture Sea Slug to get ADAM, like people did those toads/frogs that excrete hallucinogenic toxins ??) And since the stuff being smuggled in had to be paid for somehow up 'on the Surface', what besides the usual gems/gold/silver/art, WHAT Rapture-produced thing might have been traded to the Surface to get all those definitely-expensively smuggled items ? And if Fontaine could use the profits to set up whole companies, then there had to be ALOT of stuff traded in the outbound direction for him to make such profits. --- . . .